Meet Lady Pink, the ‘First Lady’ of graffiti

In 1979, Sandra Fabara was forced to break up with her boyfriend. She was 15 years old at the time, and he had been arrested after getting caught writing graffiti in their local neighbourhood in Queens, New York. As a punishment, he was sent back to live in Puerto Rico with his family, and Fabara responded with defiance.

“For two years we were pretty tight,” Pink recalls. ​“So I started tagging his name all over the school – I learnt how to do graffiti that way.”

In that same year, she enrolled in the prestigious High School of Art & Design in Manhattan. All of a sudden, she was surrounded by teenagers like her – creative visual individuals, who were unafraid to be daring. Some of her peers had recently began tagging trains, and encouraged her to come along.

“I met the kids who knew how to get into subway trains,” she says. ​“That was the whole goal, getting up onto the subway trains, so I learned that way. It was terrifying, exciting, thrilling, stressful, empowering and liberating. It was everything at once – being a rebel and adventure – but there was also a well-blown culture when I started and with that came hierarchy and social status.

• Read next: In photos: the golden age of New York City’s graffiti scene

In the early ​’80s, Lady Pink’s tag – ​“PINK” – became a distinctive signature across the city. With her detailed, distinctive style that popped with colour and embellishments, she quickly became a key figure in New York’s graffiti scene, with her work being featured in the historic 1981 New York/​New Wave exhibition at the MoMA PS1 as a 17-year-old, alongside Keith Haring, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Andy Warhol, William S. Burroughs and other leading lights of the city’s underground arts community.

Pink was a rare woman in the scene, which was dominated by men, and led to her being referred to as the ​‘First Lady of Graffiti’. ​“There was a whole decade of women through the ​’70s who wrote graffiti – dozens of women,” she says. ​“But they were had all grown up and gone when I started, so when I came along, I was the only female at that time, and there were maybe 10,000 graffiti guys across New York City.”

It never held her back, though. ​“There was a lot of sexism, but also acceptance,” she continues. ​“The feminist movement of the ​’70s had also affected boys – they were feeling the need to accept and include, so there was a lot of that. It was definitely a boys’ club though, I had to force my way in.”

Now, she’s bringing a new exhibition, Miss Subway NYC, to east London’s D’Stassi Gallery. Featuring a train carriage installation built to resemble a NYC subway station, the show pays homage to her graffiti days, while presenting the modern evolution of her style. There’s surrealist landscapes featuring buildings made out of train carriages, to work that grapples with the harsh realities of life in New York. One painting depicts a person experiencing homelessness sleeping on a subway bench. It’s a thread that has always run through her paintings and murals.

• Read next: Travelling the world with Jean-Michel Basquiat

“My early work was described by critics as being intellectual and [dealing with] social issues,” Pink explains. ​“They called me the political one out of the bunch. Other guys coming up they’d say ​‘this one’s a little cubist’, or ​‘this one’s abstract’ – I was called the activist. I didn’t know I was an activist, but coming of age in my early 20s you become aware of the world and issues, and my work changed that way.” 

And while graffiti is an act of resistance in itself, moving away from the rails and instead towards art’s traditional centres gave her greater space to explore and challenge those issues. ​“Now I’ve realised, in fine art you have complete freedom. No one can tell you anything. You can do whatever crazy madness you want and I use my voice,” she continues. ​“You can’t do the same on the street, because the public with opposite views will destroy it. But in museums and galleries, we get eh freedom to do activism in murals, and crazy stuff.”

Having been making art for over four decades, Pink says that she’s ​“tired”. But what keeps her painting and spraying is the support she receives from fans. As a trailblazer for women in underground art, her work has paved paths for others, and created space for them.

“Remember MySpace?” she asks. ​“That was one of the first social media where people from all over the world could reach out to you. I had hundreds of young graffiti writer girls across the world, and that was my first exposure to them. They were showing me their walls, like two-storey buildings, and that’s when I realised I need them – yeah I inspire them, but they inspire me to keep going and keep it real.”

• Read next: How graffiti managed to take over the art world

Isaac Muk is Huck’s dig­i­tal edi­tor. Fol­low him on Bluesky.

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